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Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care (Basic Books, 2012), by Eric Topol, a professor of innovative medicine and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute. [More]

Which limb do you prefer? If you’re like most members of our species, you prefer your right hand for most tasks.

It may be surprising to hear that hydraulic fracturing is not the cause of water contamination , but what may be even more surprising is that shale gas produced using fracking may have lower life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than conventional gas. According to a recent Environmental Science and Technology report , shale gas life-cycle [greenhouse gas] emissions are 6% lower than conventional natural gas [More]

Thinking, Fast and Slow [More]

A fighter pilot heads back to base after a long mission, feeling spent. A warning light flashes on the control panel

The Apollo 1 Command Module after the fire that claimed the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Credit: NASA. NASA s Apollo program began with one of the worst disasters the organization has ever faced

BEIJING (Reuters) - A cancer-causing cadmium discharge from a mining company has polluted a long stretch of two rivers in southern China, and officials warned some 3.7 million people of Liuzhou in the Guangxi region to avoid drinking water from the river, state media reported on Friday. Pollution of waterways by toxic run-offs from factories and farms is a pressing issue in China, prompting authorities to call for policy tightening, though the problem shows no sign of going away.

We've all heard exercise is good for your physical and mental well-being.

Carmakers learned years ago it's not easy to make a practical hydrogen fuel cell. Yet hydrogen fuel cells do work, and they're greener than batteries.

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photo by Thomas Shahan As the science media today is carrying news of how spiders use defocus to judge distance , I thought it an opportune moment to share the portfolio of a master of spider portraiture. Oklahoma artist Thomas Shahan may scarcely be out of college, but he is recognized worldwide for his startling portrayals of jumping spiders.

By Jo Marchant of Nature magazine Prion diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) are able to jump species much more easily than previously thought.

Jumping Spider: image courtesy of Science/AAAS To figure out how far away our dinner plate is our brain melds the slightly different images coming from our two eyes.

The moon of today is a static orb with little to no internal activity; for all intents and purposes it appears to be a dead, dusty pebble of a world.

Here s the sort of crazy idea that animates our office conversation at Scientific American . It all started with my colleague Michael Moyer s joke that a certain politician could build his moon base using a balloon: just capture the hot air and float all the way up. Ha ha, we all know that balloons don t work in outer space